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'Texas Challenge' to honor Vietnam vets
Spurs' owner gives $1M match grant as challenge
Updated: Friday, 13 Aug 2010, 3:47 PM CDT
Published : Friday, 13 Aug 2010, 12:16 PM CDT
AUSTIN (KXAN) - War is never a lukewarm topic of discussion – most are either for it or against it, none lacking opinions. War may be between countries, but in the trenches it is about the people: troops on the ground, in the air, on the sea. It is people who fight, people who are wounded, people who come home to loved ones – or not.
Such casualties are not forgotten, but live on in memories others cherish as the bodies rest in graves. Birthdays are remembered and anniversaries marked in a myriad of ways as families honor those who served.
The U.S. honors soldiers who died in Vietnam at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1982, it will soon have a 20,000-square-foot underground education center to go along with it. Exhibits and photographs will tell the stories of the people who served in one of this country’s most unpopular wars.
Jan Scruggs is the original founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and now serves as president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center. He is in Austin this week to kick off the “ Texas Challenge,” a matching grant project that looks to raise $1 million from Texans to help build the new center.
“Here in Texas we have a challenge from a fellow named Peter Holt, who owns the San Antonio Spurs,” explained Scruggs. “He has told us and the people of Texas that he will give us $1 million for the visitors’ center, but we have to raise $1 million here in Texas, as well. So we’re encouraging people to get involved and make a contribution , because if you contribute $10, your $10 will turn into $20, thanks to Peter Holt .”
It’s not only money the project needs. Scruggs and his group are looking for photographs of Texans who served in Vietnam and died, and that is part of his message while in Austin.
“What we’re asking people to do here in the great state of Texas is to help us get these photographs of people who gave their lives in Vietnam, from Texas. And we have a website – www.VVMF.org – that website will take you to the virtual wall and you can see the photographs. We have about 13,000 photographs now, so we need another 40,000-plus photographs to complete the effort. Here in Texas we have over 3,500 people who were casualties. We need people to help us find these photographs ,” he said.
A Vietnam veteran who enlisted in the Army when he was 18, Scruggs was wounded, but returned home to feel a responsibility to those who died. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial took but four years to fund and complete, and the education center has been in the works for the past 10 years. The honorary chairman of the project is Gen. Colin Powell, who served in Vietnam.
“We’d like to break ground for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center in 2012, so we’re hoping -- with the Texas Challenge -- we hope to raise a million bucks by the end of the year.” So far, funds raised total $24 million, but the center needs $85 million for completion.
“Legislation for it was passed by the Congress, authorizing the education center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Scruggs explained. “Legislation specified that it be built underground, so that’s what we’re doing.”
The Vietnam Wall did something significant for mourners in the U.S., said Scruggs, because it was the first large public memorial where people left things: letters, tokens, photos, special memorabilia that helped the healing. Scruggs said it started a public trend that carried over to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing in later years.
“As time went on, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial began to assume sort of a bigger role in our society. People began leaving things there,” Scruggs said. “We now have more than 120,000 items that have been left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. More than twice as many items have been left there as there are names on the memorial. There’s no anthropological or social precedent for this sort of behavior in America, of leaving things at a place. But since the memorial was built, there has been – it has changed public behavior for mourning.
“After the event in Oklahoma City people began leaving things there. There is a cultural anthropologist who has traced the advent of the highway headstones -- as you’re driving down the roads you see where people unfortunately died in car accidents -- and that this was coordinated with this license to publicly mourn. After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built, the highway headstones started to appear as well, so it’s been connected to a lot of healthy behavior for the country.”
Scruggs said more than 80 million people have visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and that “about half of the people who visit the memorial are actually younger than the memorial itself, which is now 26 years old.”
As teachers brought students to the memorial wall, Scruggs and others became involved in teaching those teachers how to teach their classes about the Vietnam War. He said they did it in a fair and balanced way.
“We did it by bringing in military veterans
and people who opposed the war, as well, to talk to the classes, as well as having them look at documentaries, and educational materials about the Vietnam War, because it’s relevant insofar as Afghanistan, Iraq and other military engagements. They’re always so compared to Vietnam. So if you have kids who are hearing about all this, and they don’t know anything about Vietnam, then you’re making sort of empty statements,” he explained.
It was out of this work that the idea to build an education center at the memorial wall emerged. Its designer is well-known Ralph Applebaum, who created the visitors center for the United States Capitol and the Congress, according to Scruggs. “He also did the Holocaust Museum and throughout the entire world, he’s done museums,” he said.
The personal photographs of each of the engraved names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall are to be the focal point at the new education center.
“There will be a big wall of photographs of casualties from the Vietnam War, which will change every day. We will have the photographs there on their birthdays. There will be a display of some of these 100,000-plus items that have been left at the wall – very powerful and emotionally charged items,” Scruggs said. “There will be, as well, a timeline of the military events that occurred during the war.”
It is the displaying of military values in these exhibits that is also an important part of the project, said Scruggs. He feels the nation at times forgets what it means to live with honor, duty, loyalty, service and courage – values instilled in those who serve in the military.
“The entire experience will be to help people better appreciate the military values: duty, loyalty, service, honor, courage,” said Scruggs. “These are the military values that have served our nation’s soldiers and Marines and the nation very well for over 200 years. So this is the place to teach people about these values.”
An “exit experience” will blend information about past other wars, even as far back as the Battle of Bunker Hill, up to present times, with a focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, to honor those in the military today.
“As you leave the education center, you will see photographs of people who have served in other wars – beginning with Lexington and Concord, in 1775, going all the way through to Iraq and Afghanistan today – so it’s relevant to everyone, not just the actual participants in the Vietnam War,” said Scruggs.
Asked about how the Vietnam veterans feel about a new education center, Scruggs said they are happy about it.
“The Vietnam vets are very enthusiastic and here in Austin, Texas, they’re very much involved. The Order of the Purple Heart is helping us out….We’ve found great enthusiasm, as well, from teachers, students and others who see this as a profound educational vehicle, something that’s never been done before on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial,” Scruggs said.
“The connection for the Vietnam veterans is that we were treated pretty shabbily when we returned. And that people our age didn’t go to the war, many of us were castigated for serving. That is the way things were back then. But what have all been trying to do is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So you see the veterans who are returning form Iraq and Afghanistan and other places, you see Vietnam vets out there, shaking their hands…welcoming home the troops, giving them a hand, helping them find jobs.”
Scruggs explained that the support base reaches wider than military members and schools.
“We’ve gotten a lot of support as well from the association of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who see this as a great thing for them because it helps the public better understand what motivated them to go into the service. A lot of upsides for this, societally. We’ve had a lot of support from corporations, to organized labor and others,” Scruggs said.
But for Scruggs, he realizes this is what he was meant to do.
“It became clear to me as my life began to unfold that taking care of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become my life’s mission,” he said. “The Education Center is enormously important for the country because this memorial center has a very profound message for the nation that’s drifting about in many ways -- in terms of our unity, in terms of our values -- that these are values that people need to learn about, and really, thankfully, most people will never have to go into the military.
“But people should learn about individuals who do go in the military, volunteer their time and risk their lives,” he continued. “It’s in the remembering of those who fought and died – or in thanking any of the servicemen and servicewomen who spend time in the military -- where glory and honor have value, in remembering the individuals for their courage and devotion to cause.”
Click here to donate to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center.
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